Collections
The College Archives, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and the Foyle Special Collections Library have rich and varied collections and these pages give an overview of the types of material that you will find in them.
A number of geographical and thematic research guides to particular areas of collection strength have been created to further aid users and can also be found in this section. You will also find information here about newly acquired or catalogued collections and individual items.
Particular collection strengths include:
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History of King's College and its merged institutions
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Military and defence studies
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Travel & exploration
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Empire and Commonwealth
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History of Medicine and hospitals, psychiatry, dentistry and nursing
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History of modern Greece
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English Literature (20th Century)
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Physical Sciences
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Religion and theology
Some images reflecting our collections can be found in iKing's galleries.
Access to rare books and manuscript collections at Middle Temple Library
By special arrangement, staff and students of King’s College London now have consultation access to the rare books and manuscript collections at Middle Temple Library. The collections cover law, theology, history, travel and topography, medicine and astrology, and include a number of books from the library of the poet John Donne. For further details of the collections and access arrangements, please consult the guide below or contact the Senior Librarian of the Middle Temple, Renae Sattlerley (tel. 020 7427 4830, r.satterley@middletemple.org.uk).
Middle Temple Library guide
Newly available
We regularly acquire new material by bequest, donation or purchase. Recently acquired items include:
A rare French pamphlet
Exposé de la situation actuelle des colonies françaises des Indes Occidentales. [S.l.]: [s.n.], 1822 [Miscellaneous Collection F2151 EXP]
This rare pamphlet – only one other library holding is currently recorded, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – complements our extensive holdings of 18th and 19th century material on the West Indies.
The anonymous author reflects on the troubled history of France’s principal Caribbean possessions, Guadeloupe and Martinique, in the decades following the French Revolution of 1789. Both had fallen into British hands during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, both had witnessed slave insurrections and bloodshed.
Slavery, which had been abolished in France’s Caribbean colonies by the republican government, only to be reinstated by Napoleon, was still in operation on both islands, despite British insistence on its abolition in Martinique as a condition of that island’s return to French rule in 1815.
The author of this pamphlet recalls the ‘sagesse’ of Louis XVI’s days and bemoans the dismal economic conditions into which the colonies had sunk and the high levels of taxation levied by the Paris government.
The Bibliothèque Nationale’s catalogue records another edition of this pamphlet, published in Bordeaux, in which the anonymous author describes himself as avocat au conseil supérieur de la Martinique.
Illustrations above: Title page and detail showing woodcut portrait device.
Report of the Argus libel case
Edward Wilson. Report of the Argus libel case: the Queen on the prosecution of George Milner Stephen versus Wilson and Mackinnon, proprietors of the ‘Argus’. Melbourne: W Fairfax & Co, 1857 [Foyle Special Collections Library: Miscellaneous Collection KD1960.A4 1857]
Complementing our existing holdings on 19th century Australia, this scarce publication comprises a verbatim report of a celebrated libel case that had considerable implications for press freedom in Britain’s Australian colonies.
In 1839 George Milner Stephen (1811–94), then acting governor of South Australia, had purchased and then sold at a profit 4,000 acres of land near Adelaide. During negotiations with a buyer Stephen had falsified some figures. This had been picked up by the local press and allegations of financial malpractice had appeared in the Adelaide register. Stephen had sued the newspaper for libel but had lost the case.
Nearly two decades later Stephen decided to stand for election to the state legislature of Victoria. The Argus, the leading Melbourne newspaper of the time, questioned in print whether it was fitting for a man with such a cloud over him to stand for public office. Stephen once again sued for libel and once again lost, the proprietors of the Argus making a strong and convincing case for the freedom of the press to investigate and make public the past record of anyone seeking to represent the electorate.
Ford Madox Ford – newly acquired items
The Foyle Special Collections Library has recently acquired a selection of works by Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). The Library would like to thank Bruce Dalin Jameson and Brian Ibbotson Groth of the Ford Madox Ford Society for kindly giving these books to the College.
These early editions of work by the prolific and influential early 20th century author and editor include novels, poetry, critical works, biography and travelogue.
New poems, published in 1927, is a limited edition of: ‘Three hundred twenty-five copies made in January 1927 at the printing house of William Edwin Rudge at Mt. Vernon, New York. Signed by the author’.
A first American edition of Great trade route, published in 1937, includes an engraved frontispiece in colour by Janice Biala, the modernist painter and Ford's lover from 1930 until his death in 1939. In this work Ford records his ‘mental journey’ as he travels to and around the United States.
As well as novels from the Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–8) and the Parade’s end tetralogy (1924–8), Ford’s 1896 biography of his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, is also included in this selection. This record of the life and work of the renowned pre-Raphaelite painter includes ‘numerous reproductions’ of his work, including his most famous painting: Work.
The Cinque Ports (1900), with illustrations by William Hyde, is a record of the historic five ports of Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, written when Ford lived in this area of southern England. Its many illustrations aid Ford’s delineation of the history of these formerly strategically important ports.
These items serve to exemplify the range of work Ford produced in his lifetime, and they complement other works by the author that have previously been given to the Foyle Special Collections Library by members of the Ford Madox Ford Society.
Max Saunders, Professor of English at King’sand author of Ford Madox Ford: a dual life (1996), comments:
'Thanks to the recent donations of first and other editions of Ford's work from members of the Ford Madox Ford Society, adding to the Ford items already acquired from Eric Mottram's library, King's now holds one of the most complete collections of Ford books. Some of the most recent donations, such as the New poems, are extremely rare. 
The collection now offers a marvellous opportunity for readers to discover the extensive range and skill of this Modernist master. Though his novel The good soldier (1915) has long been recognised as a masterpiece, his sequence of novels about the First World War, Parade's end, is now also gaining recognition as the major British fiction about that war; and is soon to be televised by the BBC in an adaptation by Sir Tom Stoppard.'
Illustration of Ford Madox Ford, (c) Alfred Cohen.